


Chava's Letters

by Haberdasher



Category: Fiddler on the Roof - Bock/Harnick/Stein
Genre: Angst, Angst and Tragedy, Canon Jewish Character, Character Death, Cross-Posted on Tumblr, Death, Family, Family Drama, Family Feels, Gen, Heavy Angst, Historical References, Holocaust, Jewish Character, Jewish Identity, Judaism, Nazi Germany, Nazis, Parenthood, Post-Canon, Religion, Religious Conflict, Religious Discussion, Russia, Soviet Union, Survivor Guilt, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-20
Updated: 2019-11-20
Packaged: 2021-02-16 08:48:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21505150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haberdasher/pseuds/Haberdasher
Summary: What happens to Tevye's family, both near and far, in the years and decades following the finale of Fiddler on the Roof.
Kudos: 25
Collections: Bad Things Happen Bingo





	Chava's Letters

Chava kept her promise to write her family (they were her family, still, even if some members of it no longer considered her theirs) once they arrived in America. Tevye, Golde, and the others who had been kicked out of Anatevka (including Motel and Tzeitel, who don’t take long to follow Tzeitel’s parents to America) get her letters regularly.

Tevye refuses to read the letters at first, but a dozen or two letters in, he relents and reads them with the rest of the family; the one line he refuses to cross is participating in writing back to Chava, but his comments frequently make it into those response letters just the same.

As time goes by, both those in America and those in Poland watch their lives shift and change around them as they adjust to living in a new country, one which often doesn’t understand their old traditions. Tevye’s two youngest daughters marry (Jewish men of their own choosing); all the married couples have children; those children grow up, and some of them begin to marry in turn. Jobs are lost and new ones found, family members grow sick and then grow healthy once more. Everyone suffers, to different extents and in different ways, but then, what else is new?

Letters are exchanged regularly, and life goes on.

As Nazi Germany comes to power, Chava’s letters begin to include tales of the persecution of Jews in that country, noting that while they left Russia because it had treated the Jewish people unfairly, it was far from the only country guilty of doing so. But she and her husband and children were in Poland, and the rest of the family was in the United States, and while neither place was entirely free of anti-Semitism, neither seemed to take it to quite the same lengths, either.

Then Germany invaded Poland, and suddenly, Chava’s letters stopped coming. Days became weeks became months waiting for her next letter, but it never came.

What news Chava couldn’t supply, the news in America was able to fill in, however. Life in Nazi Germany as a Jewish person was every bit as bad as Chava had said and more so, and now she was in it, too.

It didn’t matter, in their eyes, that she had left behind the Jewish community and the Jewish faith decades ago, had become baptized to legitimize her marriage and bring her closer to her husband. To the laws of Nazi Germany, Chava was still every bit as Jewish as she had been at birth, and so she was treated just the same as all the other Jews in Poland.

Her children, too, though they had been brought up as Christian and knew little to nothing of their mother’s old life and abandoned faith, had been born to a Jewish mother, and thus they were seen and treated as Jewish too.

And her husband, the one that had led her to leave her family in the first place? He had married a Jew, and was thus practically a Jew himself.

Chava may have left her community behind, but in the eyes of Nazi Germany, it hadn’t left her.

The horrors of what befell those poor souls who were unfortunate enough to be Jewish (or Romani, or gay, or communist, or...) in Nazi Germany came out in bits and pieces, but as months turned to years, it became clear why Chava was no longer sending them all letters: she was no longer around to do so.

The land that had once held Anatevka, as it happened, was conquered by the Nazi Germany as well, if only briefly before the Soviets pushed them back; the expulsion that had broken all their hearts those years ago had, in truth, also been their salvation.

The fate of Hodel and Perchik was harder to know, but it was clear enough that life in Siberia was no easy feat, that Russia was still not kind to its native Jewish population, and over the years, there were reports of famine and disease and massacres... but none of these were a death sentence in and of themselves; their ancestors had been through such things before and came out the other side, after all. Life being even more difficult than normal and life being impossible were still two vastly different things.

Hodel didn’t send her family letters--perhaps she didn’t know where to send them, after Anatevka became no more--so they couldn’t learn her fate from them, couldn’t find out if those letters would ever have stopped coming.

It was hard to know which was worse, the knowing or the not knowing.

America wasn’t exactly the land of prosperity that they had hoped it might be, but at least it was a land of _life_.

Tevye and Golde and their two youngest daughters kept going, kept working, kept _living_ , along with Tzeitel and Motel and the family they had established.

Tevye wondered, sometimes, if he could have saved Chava. Perhaps if he had been kinder to her, not outright rejected her as their tradition demanded but kept close and kept in touch, she could have come with them to America, where she would have been safe with them... it was impossible to know.

Tevye wondered, sometimes, why it was his burden to bear to have outlived one of his own daughters-- _at least_ one of his own daughters.

Tevye wondered, sometimes, why it couldn’t have been him that died in Nazi Germany instead of little Chava.

After hearing for sure of Chava’s fate after the war ended, getting the paperwork that made it clear that his third daughter had in fact been one of the millions slaughtered by the Nazis, Tevye stopped praying to God. Whatever God’s plans were, he didn’t want to know them any more.


End file.
